Only One Left Behind
by Rae Maxwell
Summary: Lost Boys: The Tribe - Chris is left alone in the world after a horrible accident, and he goes to the only person he had left. Life proves harder than they expected, but they grow to need one another. Chris and Edgar. Borderline Slash
1. Sheriff Station

Loss

Chapter 1 - Lost boys: Chris Emerson and Edgar Frog

This and the upcoming chapter are short episodes from my post The Tribe storyline.

Disclaimer: No profit is being made off of this work of speculative fiction, no ownership is bring claimed over these copyrighted characters.

They'd left him sitting in the police station. They'd been kind enough, giving him a spare shirt to replace the one stained with his sister's blood, offering him a coffee, asking him if he had any family to come for him. He'd just shaken his head numbly, and they'd left him alone.  
He wasn't sure what he expected when he dialled the number on Edgar's card. What was he looking for from this man? Maybe sympathy, some comfort, or maybe rejection, proving that he really was entirely alone in the world. The phone rang, and rang. Chris almost hung up.  
"Hello?"  
"Eddie.." Chris swallowed.  
"Who is this?"  
"Edgar… Nicole, she's dead, I-" Chris could hear a sob choking his voice, but he couldn't stop himself.  
The roads had been slick. Nicole had told him to slow down, and he'd bitten her head off. She sulked, turning up the music on her walkman and staring out into the darkness. She was as angry and frightened as he was, but she handled it better. She'd always been the stable one.  
They'd lost the apartment, unable to pay the rent their aunt was demanding. She'd finally thrown them out when they'd confirmed all her fears, being caught smoking weed in the house.  
It had all happened so fast. Chris still didn't know how he'd lost control of the car. His sister had started screaming, and all Chris had comprehended at first was that they were upside down, and Nicole was bleeding. She was bleeding so badly…  
When he was done, there was silence on the other end of the line, and Chris winced at the thought that Edgar had hung up. There was a rustling from Edgar, and he spoke. "Where are you?" He asked.  
"The sheriff station…" Chris replied.

"I'll come get you."

Chris nodded, and then remembered he was on the phone. "Y-yeah… Thanks a lot Eddie… I.. really, thanks."

Chris could hear Edgar pause, ready to correct the diminutive, but he didn't. "Stay. I should be there soon." He said gruffly and hung up. The young man left the police station, wandering out into the parking lot, sitting down on the curb. He shivered in the cold, but his mind was too raw with grief and guilt to leave any thought for his own comfort.  
He didn't even realise that Edgar had arrived until he felt someone wrapping a warm plaid shirt around him. "Chris." Edgar's deep voice cut through the painful trance he'd slipped into. "I'm here."


	2. Leaving

"Who lives like this?! You're not special, Edgar! You're not to blame for everything bad that happens in this universe, and do not take out your crazy survivalist shit on me!" Chris snarled, glaring at Edgar. The older man didn't react, his calmness just making Chris angrier. "Say something!" He yelled.

"You're being a child." Edgar shrugged, trying to get past him and out of the cramped trailer.

"Don't run away! Damnit Ed, you can take down vampires but you run away when I'm trying to make a fucking point!" Chris grabbed him by his shirt and tried to shove him back, but Edgar was faster. He had Chris' wrists and was forcing him against the counter. "It's Edgar." He corrected, his voice gruff with the effort of keeping calm. "If you can't live like this, then fine. Get out." He let go abruptly, and turned to leave.  
The possibility of losing the only half-way family he had left made Chris suddenly afraid. The threat twisted in his gut like a knife wound, and he couldn't let Edgar leave without feeling some of that hurt. "Did you say the same thing to your brother before he left?" he asked.

It was amazing how much things could change in only seconds.

He'd never been hit so hard. At some point he'd blacked out for a few seconds, because his memory re-started with Edgar holding a damp cloth to Chris' face to stem the bleeding from his nose, and holding him in a sitting position with one arm around his shoulders. He'd been too dazed to really absorb the unfamiliar expression on the older man's face. Chris had never seen open fear on Edgar's face, so he had no reference point to understand it.

Edgar hadn't said anything in the hours since the fight. Chris was still shaking, but wasn't sure why. He told himself that a broken nose and swollen face weren't a big deal. He'd been hurt worse in his many ill-thought-out scuffles with other surfers, but he couldn't trivialize this.

Maybe it was because he'd never thought Edgar would hurt him. It seemed stupid now. Their physical fights had always been one-sided, Chris lashing out in anger, trying to get some reaction out of the older man. He'd finally gotten one, and it felt worse than he could have imagined. Edgar Frog was one of the most violent people he had ever met, Chris told himself that he should have known that violence would someday be directed at him.

He was sitting on the bed, his eyes closed as he held an ice pack to his bruised face. He felt Edgar climb up beside him, wrapping his arm gently around Chris' shoulders in a rare hug. Chris let his head rest on Edgar's shoulder, and sighed.

"I'm not leaving."

Edgar nodded slowly. "Good."


	3. Dawn

Chris was awakened by a loud thump above. He jerked up in the passenger seat, hands flattening against the dashboard as if they were about to crash. He relaxed as soon as he saw where they were. The hunt was over for the night, and they were parked. The trailer was just visible in the headlights, because the dawn was still just a moody purple glow on the horizon.

Chris probably looked as bad as he felt. Exhausted, battered and bloody. They'd washed the more obvious gore and ash from themselves before they left the kill site, but Chris could still feel it under his fingernails. It had soaked into his clothes and settled in his hair. The blood was still wet enough to pick up a chill from the moist winter air.

He shivered.  
Edgar grunted outside, and bungee cords slithered across the truck's roof. Chris imagined the bungees snapping tight, in their precise places, one, two, three... Edgar was still awake, even after 22 hours, while Chris could barely keep his eyes open. He didnt have the slow-burning energy that Edgar had. The man could go for days without sleep, methodically researching, planning, executing; while Chris burned hot; he craved action of any kind, and stirred it up if he had to, but he was spent after just one night. He just wanted to sleep.

A damp wetsuit was in Chris' lap. He blinked, feeling the jarring time jump that occurs when you nod off and are woken up without realizing it. Edgar was back in the cab, starting the truck and throwing his own wetsuit in the back. He was breathing badly as he drove, possibly injured more than he would admit, but Chris knew better than to suggest just turning around and going home. They needed this.

The dawn was bleeding color into the land. The empty road jerked from dirt to pavement to dirt again like a bad stop motion animation, each new frame punctuated by Chris' head hitting the glass of the closed window. The dry scrub and joshua trees of the highlands flickered and became lush palms, and then sea grass tinted with purple. Time was passing in short jumps.

Chris found himself gazing at the fresh marks on Edgar's throat. Narrow and red, they were turning purple around the edges as the blood spread and clotted, except the part under his chin on the left, which the wire had cut into deeply. The purple light almost made the bruises look like tattoos, blending in with the spidery tribal on Edgar's neck that they intersected.

There was no more room in Chris' head for emotion. Edgar could have died, but he hadnt, and beyond that Chris couldnt think.

A blink, Chris' head jerking up again. The truck's tires were crunching on sand. Their surf boards would soon be unhitched, their wetsuits zipped.

Chris came alive when he hit the sharp cold of the winter sea. The waves were perfect. The air and the sea felt like they were scraping away the blood and stink of death from the night before, leaving Chris raw, naked, and cleansed. They were entirely alone out here. This time and place didnt belong to the vampires or the humans.

It belonged to the two of them.

An hour later, they were home, damp and tousled. They smelled of the pounding salt water. Their bare skin was cool as they stripped and threw the wetsuits into a tub of fresh water outside the trailer. Clean sweatpants and bed felt like heaven, nirvana, and christmas all rolled into one.

Edgar had to push his hunting partner out of the way to get in. The younger man murmured, rolling towards the wall. His eyes were closed but he listened as Edgar got into bed, feeling the mattress dip as Edgar settled down with a contented sigh. Chris smiled sleepily as he drifted off one last time.

The trailer was quiet as the clock hit 8am, and the human world was just waking up. 


	4. Three Strikes

Switching to a more narrative format. I love the abstract thoughtful style, but you cant darn well tell a story that way!

Warning: Foul language, drug use, and reference to genitalia.

...

"I'm not drinking it, its disgusting!" Chris refused, emphatically waving away the glass of Frog Juice. Edgar frowned reprovingly, looking like he might launch into an angry lecture, but Chris could tell when the older man was teasing him. Chris didnt know what it was that differentiated the real 'this means trouble' frown from the 'i really just want to see you freak out because I have a sick sense of humour' frown, but spending so much time trapped in this tiny trailer, he'd gotten to know Edgar far better than he wanted to. "And anyway! Raw egg has salmonella! It will kill you if you keep drinking it, and I am NOT taking care of you if you end up a vegetable, because that counts as self inflicted injury."

"You would just love that." Edgar countered. "You'd finish me off and take over around here."

"Oh yeah, definitely. Just one firmly pressed pillow stands between me and all of this luxury." Chris grinned, looking around the cramped trailer, its garlands of Garlic hanging everywhere and macabre decoration scheme of missing posters and comic books.

"Society's fear of raw egg is just modern squeamishness." Edgar put the glass down in front of Chris. "Cooking things robs them of all their nutrients. The human body didnt evolve to digest cooked food. Do you think ancient man cooked his food? No, he ate meat and eggs raw off the bone, or out of the shell." To emphasize his point, Edgar grabbed up the glass and downed the garlic, egg, and holy water concoction in one gulp.

Chris grimaced in disgust. "Dude, thats just gross, really. We're not cave men! I like my meat cooked! And my eggs scrambled!" The trailer really was a problem. It was built for one, not two, and over the years of living alone Edgar had filled up all the spaces that might have left room for a second person. It was also poorly ventilated, which made the Frog Juice discussion all the more urgent, because raw egg and garlic STANK to high heaven.

It was about 4pm, but still breakfast time for the two of them. The day after a hunt, 4pm was considered 'getting up early'. "Since you have the eggs out, you gonna make us some breakfast?" Chris asked, bracing his hands behind his head and leaning back. "I did the dishes." He reminded Edgar as the man cupped his hands around a match, lighting up a joint. The man modest grove of mary jane in a field nearby, and was a regular user, except when he was on a hunt, at which point he ran strictly on frog juice and caffiene.

"Last week." Edgar replied, smirking a bit, taking a drag and offering it to Chris, who accepted it with a nod. "Fine. Eggs and..." Edgar opened their tiny fridge and dug around, taking out a package of bacon they had opened god-knows-when and sniffing it. ".. and bacon." He tossed it on the counter.

Chris raised an eyebrow as he watched this. "You'll try it first, and if you die I'll know not to eat it..." Chris said, his eyes on the issue of Spider Man he had been flipping through while hey talked. Peter Parker and Wolverine had switched bodies, and Chris kept flipping back to the page where Peter-in-Wolverine's-Body woke up, realized he was buff and hairy and in a strange bed, and spent a few panels staring at his own massive cock under the blanket. Wolverine slept naked. Of course Chris was just guessing how big Wolverine's cock was, since this was a kid-friendly comic, it was tastefully hidden in the image, but Peter's face spoke volumes.

That was another problem with the trailer. Not Edgar's penis size of course, it would have to be pretty extreme to cause a problem in their living situation. That really wasnt Chris' concern. No, the issue was that there was only one bed. It was a double. They werent small people. Well, Ed was small vertically, but he was wide. Chris was narrow but tall.

And between the two of them, they made two exactly average sized people...

Of course there was a fold-out couch bed built into the trailer, but opening it would require moving all of Edgar's missing person files and all his boxes of comic books. And move them where? Chris' few belongings had ended up wedged wherever there was room, and there wasnt much of that. His clean-ish laundry was currently draped over their pile of road and topographical maps in cardboard and plastic tubes.

Looking around, they probably could have changed things around if they had wanted. They could move the DC box under the backup stake box... clean up the stack of tools and sharpening equipment with kind of ikea thing... but they had gotten pretty comfortable in that bed. Chris had been too messed up to care at first, and once things had started to make sense again, he'd already started to see that warm spot against the wall as his spot. It was his territory, his home, and he wasnt going to give it up.

With all it's crappy ventilation, confining salt circle, hidious barren real-estate, stifling heat in the summer, (and Chris could go on and on), this place was home.

In the days just after Nicole's death, with Edgar so obviously uncomfortable with someone in his space, and chris almost suicidally guilty... it had been bad. You wouldnt have been able to tell either of them that a year later they would be some form of happy together. It wasnt perfect, but it was... what was it? It was comfortable. It was safe. It risked nightly dismemberment and death, but somehow, it really did feel safe.

The eggs and bacon were crackling in the pan and chris was absorbed in the comic when suddenly Edgar froze, turning his head towards the front window and lifting the pan from the element to quiet it.

Chris looked up, knitting his brows. "What is it?"

"Car." Edgar said, shutting off the burner and abandoning their breakfast, diving for the open windows, dropping and locking them. Chris put out the joint and grabbed up the baggie of pot, throwing it into it's tin box and hiding it. The two of them knew the checklist off by heart, each of them having their assigned roles. First, secure all windows and doors, second, conceal illegal sustances and visible weapons, third, arm yourself and man positions.

Before the car came rumbling around the bend, the place was locked down, and would look long deserted if the smell of eggs, bacon, garlic, and unfortunately, weed, wasnt seeping out the seams of the trailer. Chris and Edgar were at their strategic posts on either side of the door, able to see outside without being seen. They were armed with stakes, ready for anything.

The modern sedan slowed down but kept moving, as if the driver was unsure. Chris swore. "Oh fuck, it's Aunt Jillian..."

"From the funeral?" Edgar asked, peering out through the tinted glass at the car as it stopped. Jillian had taken care of Nicole's funeral, and had made it extremely clear who she blamed for the girl's death. She and her nephew hadn't spoken since.

"Why is she here?" Chris sighed.

"I could get rid of her." Edgar offered, hefting his stake.

"No!" Chris put out a hand to stop him. He holstered his own stake at his hip and looked out. "I dont want to talk to her..."

Outside, the woman was clutching her purse in determination and striding towards the door.

"I'll get rid of her." Edgar said. "Non-violently." He added, in response to Chris look of panic. He unlocked and ducked out the door, meeting her just inside the salt circle, planting himself firmly with arms crossed. "Ma'am. You are trespassing on Frog Brothers territory. Turn around and leave. This is fair warning."

"I will do no such thing! Jillian snapped. I am here to talk to Chris, not you! Chris! I know you re in there!"

"I dont care why you're here. Get off my property!" He growled.

"YOUR property?" She sneered. "This belongs to Realton Corporation. I sold it myself, now get out of my way!" She pushed by him and made for the trailer. Edgar grabbed her by the arm and forced her back. The woman screamed. "Get your hands off me!"

Chris ran out, and seperated the two, keeping Edgar at bay with two hands on his chest. "Everybody just chill out! Please! Eddie! She s family, asshole! Dont hurt her!"

Jillian backed off and smoothed back her hair, clucking dissaprovingly. "I could have you up on assault charges! I know who you are, Edgar Frog! I know what you did to Star!"

Edgar glared at her, restraining himself for Chris benefit. "I SAVED star! She would have spent eternity as the UNDEAD if we hadnt intervened!"

"You and all the other longhairs! Your reefer, and your disgusting sex, you took my sister away from me! And Nicole! It was this one s influence that led you and your sister into the drugs and the parties, wasnt it?" She demanded, looking at Chris.

"What?" Chris asked, bewildered.

"Chris... Honey, it wasnt your fault. Jillian explained softly. I realize that now. I m sorry for throwing you and your sister out. I was just afraid, thats all. I was afraid I'd lose you to the hippies the way I lost your mother." She looked distant, turning over the painful memories of her sister s dissapearance a lifetime ago, while Chris could only stare dumbly, since none of this made sense to him. "I was wrong. I should have tried to help you both, not punish you! You can come and live with me. I wont even charge you rent until you get on your feet! Dont let him drag you into this life!"

Chris stared at her angrily. "Look, Aunt Jillian. No. Edgar fucking came for me when you would have left me alone and homeless! Where the hell have you been for a year?"

"Thats how it starts! They find you when you re vulnerable!" Jillian exclaimed. "What good has he done you? You have no job, I heard you were arrested, I can SMELL the reefer on you! You re going down a deadly path, Chris, and I m not losing another family member to that!"

Edgar broke in with a snarl. "Star made her own decisions! So has Chris, and they both decided to get away from YOU! You're worse than any suckmonkey, at least they only come into your home when invited."

Jillian was not intimidated by him, and she narrowed her eyes. "What kind of man takes in a young, vulnerable boy like this? You re a predator. A disgusting... I cant even say it!" She covered her mouth in horror.

Chris stared at her. "I'm nineteen years old! I'm not a kid! And Edgar is like... twenty...something..." he looked at Edgar for confirmation, and found no help there.

Jillian had the gleam of victory in her eyes. "I did a background check. He is 36!"

"It doesnt matter, because we arent- he never! We arent doing it, Aunt Jillian! For god s sake!" Chris protested.

She wasnt listening. "...and has been in prison twice, once for assault with a weapon, and once for felony burglary. One more, and you go to jail for life, Edgar Frog. Three strikes." The threat was clear as she gazed cooly at Edgar.

"Leave. Leave right now." Chris said. "Just go!"

"There is a room waiting anytime you need it, Chris." She said, and then turned to go, not hurrying and she got into her car and left.

The two men stood, watching her until the car had dissapeared from view. Chris looked at Edgar, who was still staring after her, fist clenched around his stake. Chris turned away, looking across the inlet that bordered the property on two sides. "Shit..."


End file.
